A Japanese high-school student recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after posting photos of an incredibly detailed action figure he made out of around 300 discarded cicada shells.

Twitter-user @ride_hero came up with the idea of using discarded cicada shells for artistic purposes after accidentally stepping on one at school. Looking at the shattered shell, he thought to himself “what a waste” and challenged himself to come up with a way of reusing all the discarded cicada shells at his high-school. Evening Cicadas, or Higurashi, are very common in Japan during the summertime, and they tend to shed their shells almost everywhere, so it wasn’t hard for @ride_hero to collect hundreds of them in his high-school yard alone. After finishing his AO exams, the high-school senior needed to kill some time over the summer vacation, so he started experimenting with the collected cicada shells.

Maybe “stone paintings” isn’t the best phrase to describe the amazing artworks of Stefano Furlani, but it’s so unusual that I just didn’t know what to call it. The Italian artist basically searches for geometrically appropriate stones on the beach and arranges them to create complex compositions.

Stefano Furlani discovered this fascinating art form while playing with his son Davide, when he was three years old. They would scour the beach for strangely shaped stones and then assemble them into all kinds of shapes and designs, on the sand, under an umbrella. As time passed and they both got better at this ‘game’, they started creating more and more intricate and detailed artworks, and at one point, Stefano started feeling disappointed that the artworks he and his son had worked so hard to create got washed out by the sea or trampled on by other people. So he started creating these stone compositions on hard canvases and preserving them as proper works of art.

Most people spend a considerable amount of time deciding what design or phrase they want permanently inked on their bodies, but one tattoo artist asks his clients to leave that decision to him. Several hundreds of people have already allowed him to ink the phrase of his choice on them without even knowing what it reads beforehand.

Monty Richthofen, a.k.a. Maison Hefner, had only been doing tattoos for a year and a half in 2017, when he started “My Words, Your Body”, an artistic project where he tattoos wiling adults with motivational quotes and mantras without revealing what they are before permanently inking them. Clients only decide what part of their body they want tattooed, but the tattoo itself is Hefner’s choice. He has a conversation with every person and based on their discussion and his experience, he picks one of around 5,000 different phrases he has scribbled in five notebooks.

The head of a Russian advertising agency tasked with creating large building facades to promote the 2018 World Cup in Russia has come under fire for using one of the nearly 50-meter-tall facades to pay tribute to his wife, by using her as the model.

Ivan Panteleev, director of advertising agency Novatek Art has been criticised by street artists and members of the general public for putting a giant portrait of his wife Daria on a building facade funded by the Moscow city budget. Four murals were commissioned and co-sponsored by the city’s public relations committee in 2016, to remind the people of Moscow of the upcoming (now ongoing) World Cup, and some people didn’t like that Panteleev used his wife, of all people, as the model for one of the giant artworks.

Some artists spend decades honing their skills before even tackling hyperrealistic art, but 11-year-old Kareem Waris Olamilekan is already a professional artist with some stunning hyperrealistic artworks in his portfolio.

Kareem, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, started expressing his artistic talents when he was around six years old, by drawing his favorite cartoon characters. His big break however, occurred two years later, when he and his family moved houses and he discovered the Ayowole Art Vocational Academy. His talent for drawing was evident, and despite facing great financial difficulties and struggling to buy basic artistic supplies, the young boy managed to improve his skills to the point where he is now able to draw detailed photo-like drawings.

Miru, a Tokushima-based wool felt artist, has been getting a lot of attention on Japanese social media for his incredibly realistic wool-felt animals. Looking at some of his works, it’s not hard to see why everyone is so impressed.

Miru discovered wool felt art in 2010, when he saw a master of the craft work his magic during a TV show. He was captivated by this art form soon started experimenting with the material. However, at one point he realized that he needed a bit of guidance to unleash his full artistic potential, so he bought a book on wool felt art that he claims opened his eyes to the possibilities of the material. Over the last 8 years he has honed his skills to the point where it is sometimes nearly impossible to tell some of his wool felt animals apart from live ones.

Jason Stieva has been doing Gothic assemblage art for roughly two decades, but his most intricate and impressive creation has to be the Leviathan – Ark of Apocalypse, an 8 feet high, 7.5 feet long ghost ship populated by hundreds of strange creatures.

Most of the artworks in Jason Stieva’s ongoing “Gothic Times” series are incredibly detailed, but he himself admits that the Leviathan – Ark of the Apocalypse was his most daunting project ever, and that he will most likely will never make anything like it again. And just looking at pictures of this incredible artwork, you can understand why. Although measuring over 7 meters in length, 2.5 meters in width and standing at a whopping 8 feet tall, this ghostly ship is brimming with detail. From the steampunk-inspired gears at the bottom of the ship and the dozens of cannons dominating its sides, to the hundreds of skeletons and other ghastly creatures populating its deck and multiple crow’s nests, it’s just so much to take in.

Mike Parr, a 73-year-old Australian performance artist, recently spent three days in a container buried under one of the busiest roads in Tasmania, with no food, as a “response to 20th-century totalitarian violence in all its forms”.

The unusual performance was apparently conceived a decade ago for an arts festival in Germany, but could not be pulled off due to health and safety concerns. However, the Hobart City Council, in Tasmania, approved it last month, as part of the Dark Mofo festival, as long as the organizers agreed to cover the roadwork bill. That included literally cutting a section of road and digging a large hole under it in order to lower a large metal container in it, and covering it up so that traffic could go on as usual for the three days Mike Parr spent buried inside.

Arun Kumar Bajaj has a very unusual skill – he can paint with a sewing machine. Technically, it’s embroidering, not painting, but his artworks are so incredibly detailed that they could pass as hyper-realistic paintings to the untrained eye. And the fact that he does it all with a sewing machine just makes it that much more impressive.

Arun was really good at drawing and painting growing up and dreamed of becoming a famous painter, but his father’s sudden death, 15 years ago, foiled his plans and forced him to abandon school in order to run the family business. His father was a tailor and he became one too, but he didn’t let the artist in him die. Instead, he started “painting” with needle and thread, but instead of using his hands, he decided on a rather unusual embroidering tool – the sewing machine. It took him a while to master this unique art form, but today he is recognized as the world’s only sewing machine artist.

Georgina Ryland, a makeup artist and beauty blogger from Brisbane, Australia, creates incredible body art using her own body as the canvas.

We’ve all seen impressive body art before, but what sets Georgina Ryland’s works from those of other talented body painters is that she actually paints the artworks on her own body, instead of using a model. All I can tell you about the artistic process is that it involves using a mirror, as well as a steady hand and mountains of patience. I for one can’t understand how she can paint backwards, by looking in a mirror, but judging by the quality of her work, she’s gotten really good at it.

Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

Asia Eriksen, a horror enthusiast from Coaldale, Pennsylvania, has found an intriguing way of combining her artistic talent and her passion for horror – she spends weeks, sometimes even month,s creating custom werewolf babies called “werepups”.

34-year-old Asia Eriksen got the idea for her creepy Werepups as a child. The horror flick Silver Bullet got her really interested in werewolves, and at one point she started thinking about having a baby werewold for a pet. However, the horror enthusiast had no idea that she would end up making her childhood fantasy a reality herself, until she met her husband, who worked in special effects. Asia started experimenting with his materials and at one point made her first werepup sculpture, which her husband turned into a mould. The artist recalls that, at the time, she was just making the toy she had dreamed of as a child, not knowing that others would be interested in it. Today, werepups are so sought-after by horror fans that Eriksen can hardly keep up with demand.

A French street artist has found a way to bring Bitcoin to the art world. By incorporating QR codes in his murals, he is able to receive donations directly from passers-by who appreciate his artworks.

Pascal ‘PBOY’ Boyart started adding Bitcoin QR codes to his street murals in November 2017, and he has so far received over $1,000 in cryptocurrency donations from people who just wanted to show their appreciation and support for his art. The donation system is extremely simple and fast – anyone with a smartphone and a Bitcoin wallet can just scan the QR code in the mural and transfer funds directly to the artist. Boyart isn’t sure if he is the first artist to use this system, but he definitely sees others relying on decentralised currencies going forward, as it cuts the middlemen – art galleries or crowdfunding platforms – allowing artists to directly connect to their audience.

A 40-year-old man allegedly traveled almost 10,000 miles from England to an art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where he used a sharp object to slash a $3 million dollar painting by New York artist Christopher Wool, before storming out. It was later revealed that the painting was owned by his father.

The bizarre incident occurred last year, on May 2, when a man wearing sunglasses, black jeans, a black jacket, a hat, gloves and a full beard entered the Opera Gallery in Aspen and walked directly up to a painting called “Untitled 2004”. He then took a knife or other cutting object out of his jacket pocket and slashed the painting twice before running out of the gallery. A one-year investigation recently revealed that the man who carried out the slashing was none other than Nicholas Morley, son of the painting’s owner, one Harold Morley.

In what the local community has named a ‘catastrophe’, a museum in Elne, Southern France, dedicated to the work of painter Etienne Terrus recently discovered that at least 82 of its 140 artworks were actually fakes.

The Terrus museum in Elne had bought the paintings, drawings and watercolors over a period of 20 years, for a total price of around 160,000 euros ($193,000), but concerns regarding their authenticity were raised only recently. Art historian Eric Forcada, who was entrusted with overseeing the entire Terrus collection while the small museum was being renovated, apparently noticed that some of the buildings depicted in the artworks had been built after the artist’s death, so they couldn’t possibly have been painted by him. But the buildings that weren’t supposed to appear in Terrus artworks led the historian to more unusual discoveries.